Moving Out
by Fairiebutterfly
Summary: Cleaning up after a volatile sorcerer has its risks, and its rewards. Set in the City of the Gods, mid-ItHotG. One-shot. A Thom story.


I don't, of course, own anything created by Tamora Pierce, which in this case would include the City of the Gods, Tortall, the Mithran religion, or Thom (although I wish I did; he's cute). This is just a one piece short story I wrote when I should have been studying for AP Government. It's not going to have more chapters, although I might do more Thom-variety stuff in the future. Thank you, as always, for reading.

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There weren't very many servants in the City of the Gods, or at least, not in the Mithran Cloisters. Most of the priests and sorcerers in residence made do with commandeering the services of the novices, who come be ordered to do almost anything for their education. It worked well particularly in the esoteric callings of the Mithrans: cleaning a room was meditation, sweeping the floor was discipline; there was a lesson to be learned in pulling weeds from the vegetable gardens. Of course, if the novice couldn't see the lesson in such menial tasks, he wouldn't admit it. And if the adepts and masters couldn't invent a lesson, they would only have to imply that it was for the novice to figure out on their own—the psychology of the practice sufficed to coerce the white-robed students into most tasks. 

Roald's reign was peaceful, and the realm was prospering, and this state of affairs had an indirect effect on the servant's quarters of the cloisters, just as it did everywhere else. The nobles' children given to the priests were used to being served, and the few offered up by the more pretentious of the middle class were likely to have come from a flourishing house with servants of its own. Temple coffers were full, and the Mithrans could afford a few more real servants than they might have preferred. There were always meals to be cooked and dishes to be washed, tasks too common to be given to the novices, lest it regularly cut into their study time.

Halvar slipped along the hallway, his skinny twelve-year-old frame exceedingly ignorable, garbed as it was in the drab brown clothes of the cloisters servants. The son of servants, he harboring few ambitions of every being anything else, other than the childish daydreams which afflict everyone—dreams of being a knight, a sorcerer, or a dragonslayer, regardless of his lacking nobility, the Gift, and a dragon. He was otherwise quite resigned to being a servant, but he welcomed any variance in his scheduled tasks.

Washing dishes was dull. Dusting was dull. However, every now and then a priest, lacking an available novice, would spot an idling servant and put them to some other task, something necessary but uncommon and perhaps just a little bit dangerous—

—Such as changing the linens in a sorcerer's bedchamber.

The door was closed, but that was less of a problem than the prospect of spells guarding the suite of rooms reserved for the wizard. Tentatively, Halvar set the key he had been given to the lock, and screwed his eyes shut as he turned it. He had often been thought dull or crippled from his lack of speech, but as a result he heard much of what was only whispered, and when he opened his eyes again, he was as relieved to see that he was still a normal size and shape as he was to find the door open. Being a servant had to be preferable to being a frog, or having been reduced to a sad mist or a lonely pair of eyeballs and nothing else: sorcerers were tricky.

This particular set of rooms, however, looked as to justify the lack of suspicious guarding spells. Chests and boxes were set haphazardly around the room, most of them closed tight, locks glinting warningly. What wasn't packed away was untidy—the bed was unmade, books seemed to have engineered an escape from the prison of their shelves, loose papers were anchored with random weights, some water glasses, and one perfectly round glass globe that looked to contain swirling, sentient mist—perhaps the remains of the last servant that cleaned. Halvar couldn't resist looking closer, moving aside a stack of used plates to see it like a moth drawn by fatal curiosity to what might kill it. The globe remained impassive to his inspection, though, the fog inside blown by a constant, imperceptible breeze.

Other wonders beckoned. On a table in the corner was an inexplicable creation of silver wire and small round weights. With the gentlest nudge of a finger, he set it whirring, and he jumped at the high pitched whistle that filled the air as long as it moved. He stilled it quickly.

Recalling his mission, he efficiently stripped the bed of its sheets, and bundled them together to the laundry. Judging from the packing, he deemed this sorcerer to be moving out, the fresh sheets then, were for the new occupant. He pondered it idly as he tucked the corners of the clean linen around the mattress. Here, what was this? His hand had happened on another sheaf of paper as he smoothed the side of the sheet between mattress and wall; it must have fallen behind.

No menial served in this learning place without acquiring some knowledge of letters. He glanced over the paper quickly, from bottom to top. The signature was an Alan; the name meant nothing to the boy. The mention of the prince in the long paragraphs caught his attention, however, as did the greeting: Thom. This, then, was the room of Adept Thom, who was widely gossiped about but rarely seen. Summoned to protect the prince? It didn't matter; the sorcerer's reputation was such that a thrill of real fear whispered through the young servant, and he folded it up and set it neatly on the table.

He hesitated: would the sorcerer know of his tampering, to find it arranged so? Or had it only been accidentally dropped behind the bed, and had been forgotten? No—Halvar's sharp eyes noted the creasings and worried edges of the letter—this was something that had been the object of much attention. It wouldn't have been so overlooked. This decided, he carefully replaced the letter behind the mattress, not so far down that it would be lost, but where it would be possible that a careless servant had missed it.

A noise behind him made him flinch, but he turned the slow turn of the not-guilty, a maneuver he had long since learned from his brothers. His gaze was caught by frighteningly purple eyes, and his eyes darted from them to the bright copper hair to the extravagant jewel in Adept Thom's ear, rather out of place above his more sober robes. The man reached up a self-conscious hand to unfasten it, lips curled in a wry smile.

"I must be gone already if they sent a fumble-fingered servant in to sweep up after me. How heartbreaking." His unnerving eyes went to the globe, then to the silver device, then rested on Halvar. "Are you quite finished meddling?"

The boy licked his lips. He couldn't answer, he never could; his throat seized up on him, and speech was impossible. To save face, he had learned to keep his lips shut tight, and it was often mistaken for stoicism. Such seemed to be the case now, as Thom looked through him to the bed, and unhesitatingly went to it and reached behind to retrieve the letter. He opened it, but didn't bother reading something he had already gone through—from the condition the paper was in, probably multiple times. "And here too, sticky fingers." The next glance was a sharp one. "What's your name boy, that you would make so bold?"

No answer. Halvar stared steadily at a place just above the sorcerer's nose. If he kept his gaze blank enough, he would be thought a simpleton and dismissed.

Anger slowly filled Thom's face, and he raised a hand to—Halvar didn't know what. Strike him, perhaps, or throw fire, or transform him into a frog. Whichever, he rather regretted ever wishing not to wash dishes.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

The adept looked rueful. "You aren't stupid. You look it, but I would like to think I'm not so easily fooled. You—" He paused, folding the letter between the pages of a book and setting it on the bed. "You've been a bit too clever, but it was stupid of me to take the spells from the door so soon." His words were slow and precise, with the cadence of someone tapping their foot in thought. Then he laughed. "Of course, I can't let you spread talk about what your clever mind might have read. Servants gossip. I don't need that. I'm taking a nice trip to the capital to live a pampered life at court, which I will have, excluding the interest of certain smiling sorcerers. So."

The hand, which he had let fall to his side, rose again. Not taking his purple eyes from Halvar's common brown ones, he made a knotting motion in the air. The tightness in the boy's throat was suddenly much worse, almost unbearable—then it lessened. Slowly, gingerly, he put a hand to his neck.

Thom broke the gaze and rolled his shoulders; somehow, the motion reminded the boy of a cat shaking water from its fur. He sat at the desk and began rearranging paperweights and papers. "You won't talk, not that you were going to, of course." The voice was rich with self-satisfaction, the face turned away. Halvar no longer occupied the man's attention, except peripherally. "And they say I'm not prudent."

Halvar hastily gathered the laundry and sneaked towards the door. He had stayed quite long enough, and wasn't about to dare more dangers in this mad sorcerer's room. But he was stopped a few steps away, and something was pressed into his hand.

"For your trouble."

Only once outside the room did Halvar set down the laundry to open his hand. In it sparkled one extravagantly large diamond earbob. The price of a voice he never had, and a curiosity that he just might keep.


End file.
